


cornflower blue

by blackeyedblonde



Category: True Detective
Genre: 1995ish Era, Domestic, Gen, Kid Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-12
Updated: 2015-07-12
Packaged: 2018-04-08 21:46:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,410
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4321911
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blackeyedblonde/pseuds/blackeyedblonde
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rust can feel Macie's eyes like a songbird’s wingtips along the side of his face as she slides back onto the seat next to him, curling one bare foot up under her like she might need it for leverage to leap up and spring away.</p><p>“Can I play with your hair?” she asks, and at first Rust thinks he heard her wrong, wonders if his ears are going to start pulling the rug out from under him now in cohorts with his eyes, whispering things in a toddler’s voice that he’d have to bash clean from his skull to escape. But neither the fine sheen of sweat that breaks out on his forehead or the shyness in her small voice belies the fact, and he blinks at her once and again before he can force the half-hoarse word out of his throat in a gentle rasp.</p><p>“What?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	cornflower blue

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Zooheaded](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zooheaded/gifts).



> A slightly late birthday offering for Leen, whose work [Maintenance](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4059475) is one of my absolute favorite Rust-centric genfics I've ever read. It definitely inspired this in terms of detail and feely-good moments and certain gross art references, so please go throw some love that way if you haven't already.
> 
> This is very likely a companion piece to my prior fic "shiny green ink," in which my bleeding heart just wants this sad scarecrow of a man to be fed and taken care of and not feel like total death for once. There had to have been some Good Years between '95 and '02, folks. I won't hear anything otherwise.

  
  
Rust stares down at his boots where they press into the doormat, the bristled material still damp and pliable under his feet where a gust of rain had blown up onto the porch earlier in the afternoon. He shifts his center of gravity and the mat squelches some beneath his weight, wheezing out like something small and dying.

The doorbell echoed through the house seven seconds ago. He’s got the same number of cigarettes in a pack bought that morning tucked inside his breast pocket, and he wonders if that’ll be enough to get him through dinner and that southern-fried compulsory hour where Marty likes to drink slow out on the back porch and talk about nothing.

But then there’s the scurry of bare feet sounding from inside the house and he takes a step back, dropping his line of sight to somewhere around the level of a face that still only sees eye-to-eye with his stomach. As sure as the world, the door swings open and two drops of clear sea glass are looking up at him, edged with a snaggle-toothed smile that might’ve once spread across the younger face of Maggie Hart.

“Hi Mr. Rusty,” Macie says, halfway hiding behind the door even as she pulls it open further, tentatively revealing one knee plastered over with two tie-dye print bandages. “Daddy was saying you weren’t ever gonna get here.”

A warm gust of rosemary and cilantro greets Rust in the foyer before anything else does, shortly followed by Marty’s voice calling in from the family room. “Wondering if you were ever gonna make it,” he hollers, still a disembodied voice while Rust edges past the bookshelves full of family photos and fishing trophies, trying to trace the path Macie had left in her wake like he’s following in a stronger boat’s current.

“Game’s on,” Marty says when Rust manifests in the doorway, idly watching the other man’s hand sink down to clutch his left hip before jutting his chin toward the empty loveseat. “Take a load off, supper’ll be ready in a little bit.”

Audrey is settled on her stomach by the coffee table, scrawling something in a little book decorated with garish shades of pink and purple, rainbows and cartoonish moonbeams and a pair of kittens with eyes like wide blue gemstones. She catches Rust from beneath the blonde fan of her lashes and smiles shyly, looking back down while her pen continues to scratch.

Something clangs in the kitchen and Rust turns until his eyes brush up against Maggie, tied up in her half-apron and leaning over a simmering pot with a wooden spoon in one hand and a metal lid in the other. The kitchen heat has flushed her face rosy and the silver heart around her neck dangles midair, swinging a little as she stirs.

“Hey, Rust,” she says before setting the pot cover back in place, glancing up to blow a wisp of bangs off her forehead. “How’re things going?”

That one word clatters around in his head for a second, flapping like a house-caught bird trying to find an open window, and he wonders what kind of things she might mean—work, women, the six hours of sleep he’d only fallen into like the slow burn of drowning in the past two days.

“Just fine,” he says, sinking back further into the cushions, hands spreading down the denim on his thighs. “Thank you for having me.”

“You been coming over here two or three times a month for near about a year, still thanking us like this is a damn soup kitchen,” Marty snorts, holding out the TV remote to inch the volume up a notch higher. “When Mags stops putting out her special soap in the guest bathroom, that’s when you know you ain’t any highfalutin company.”

“What he means is that you’re welcome over for dinner anytime,” Maggie says, clapping her wooden spoon on the side of a different pot with a little more force than she might’ve needed. “Can we get you anything while you wait?”

“N’ome,” Rust says, and it was one mumbled syllable but Maggie’s icy eyes flash something tinged warmer when it falls from his mouth, having heard both words all the same. _No ma’am._

Rust shakes his head with his eyes cut somewhere in the general direction of the television, already itching to reach into his pocket and pull out a cigarette, his one best effort made in lieu of a party trick. He picks at the hem of his flannel shirt instead, rolling the soft fabric between two fingers, shivering a little when one thumbnail edges wrong along a seam.

“You didn’t bring your book this time,” Macie says, easing down onto the empty cushion next to him. She turned eight a fortnight ago and although Rust had waived an awkward invitation to the Saturday afternoon party, Marty had showed up to work on Monday morning with a paper plate wrapped in tin foil and slid it across his desk in a casual offering. _Know you ain’t too big on sweets ,_ he’d said, _but that strawberry filling is some good shit, man. Real fuckin’ deal._

(And it had been good, good enough that he’d forgone a fork and napkin to suck the pink cream and sweet red jelly right off his fingers, hunched against a counter in the empty break room like maybe he’d gone and done something more guilt-ridden than snort up the contents of a sealed box in the evidence locker.)

“Left it at home,” Rust says, and it’s sitting on the passenger seat of his truck under a stack of unopened mail but he isn’t going to tell her that, not when he’s got twelve pages left ‘til empty and the whole thing’s filled with crime scene cutouts and notes he scrawls in the margins between synaptic backfires that go off like wet fireworks in his head. One big tragedy, from cover to fucking cover.

But any thoughts on the book seem to have tipped out of Macie’s ear and onto the carpet, because Rust can feel her eyes like a songbird’s wingtips along the side of his face as she slides back onto the seat next to him, curling one bare foot up under her like she might need it for leverage to leap up and spring away.

“Can I play with your hair?” she asks, and at first Rust thinks he heard her wrong, wonders if his ears are going to start pulling the rug out from under him now in cohorts with his eyes, whispering things in a toddler’s voice that he’d have to bash clean from his skull to escape. But neither the fine sheen of sweat that breaks out on his forehead or the shyness in her small voice belies the fact, and he blinks at her once and again before he can force the half-hoarse word out of his throat in a gentle rasp.

“What?”

One of Macie’s hands comes up to fidget around the neck of her lilac-colored t-shirt, the rest of her limbs twisting and squirming under the newborn unease she hadn’t anticipated when asking him this question. But she sighs a little and doesn’t give up just yet, picking at a loose thread on her shorts while the murmured words sink into the loveseat cushions between them.

“Audrey won’t let me most of the time,” Macie says, almost mournful. “Mommy likes it but she’s cooking dinner, and then she says I can’t mess it up until you go home anyhow.”

When Rust’s voice comes back again it sounds like it has better luck belonging to somebody else. “I don’t have much to play with,” he says. “Wouldn’t be too fun.”

“You have more than Daddy does,” she says, smiling slight and meeting his eye like she’s passing a sliver of joke between them. “’Sides, it’s really pretty, I think.”

Marty’s eyes dart away from the television and refocus when he hears his domestic moniker, one hand come up to push through the golden hair on top of his head in an unconscious sort of impulse. “What kinda monkey business are you up to over there?” he asks, looking back to the game while he stretches one leg out to gently nudge Macie in the side with a socked foot. “You keep asking Rust to draw a picture every time he comes over here, pretty soon we’ll be able to paper the walls with them.”

“Nothin’,” Macie says, right at the same time Audrey chimes in from her spot on the floor, “She wants to play with his hair.”

Cheers erupt as somebody scores on the TV and Marty’s face is still turned toward the screen but his eyes have swiveled back around to find Rust and his youngest daughter. He looks vaguely confused for a moment, lips parted into a soft “o,” but then that expression breaks under the sound of softly snorted laughter and the muffled slap of one palm making touchdown on his thigh.

“Honey,” he says, voice slanted odd on one side. “That’s not really something you just ask company, y’know? Boys don’t like fooling around with that kinda stuff—plus, I’m sure Rust don’t want you messing up his hair to start with.”

Marty shakes his head and slides Rust a put-on look meant to be a halfhearted apology for the trouble, like maybe Macie was a puppy who’d jumped up and pressed two dirty paw prints into his clean work pants. Incidental happenstance. That strange and cumbersome unpredictability that comes standard with young children, an ongoing and enigmatic affair in the life of Martin Hart.

“You can find something else to do, Mace,” Maggie says from the kitchen, and Rust hadn’t realized she’d been listening but feels something behind his ribs twist up when he catches sight of Macie’s downturned mouth, like somebody had pulled one end of a pink satin bow.

And it takes some forced and self-guided effort, in the end, and the release of one long breath he’d been holding in like a death rattle, but then he’s sliding forward on the loveseat and easing himself down to the floor, not stopping until he’s got both hands braced flat on the carpet and a cushion wedged between his shoulder blades.

“Here,” he murmurs, willing the tension in his shoulders to drop and unfurl, thinking of tightfisted flower buds still too green to open without prying. “You can, if you want.”

Marty’s mouth moves to say one thing before he thinks better of it, eyes gone a little wary while they waver over the other man on the floor. “Rust,” he says, showing off an awkward edge of smile. “You don’t have to—”

“S’alright,” Rust says, watching the TV so intently he’s not even sure what he’s looking at anymore. “I don’t mind.”

Macie only lets out a smile-threaded sigh and shifts around on the loveseat until she’s kneeling behind his head, one knee brushing the back of his neck while she gets situated and settled with a little box of something she must’ve had at the ready. For all her usual excitement and bubbling she moves around him now like she’s walking up on a greenbroke horse, hands moving slow and with a careful sort of reverence, the peachy-pink shade of her contentment something deep and saturated enough to feel.

“Thanks, Rusty,” she whispers, the sound of it whistling through her two missing teeth, and there was no real favor to thank but Rust rolls those words around while he wills himself not to balk and run, waiting for the first gentle touch of tiny fingers. They make tentative landfall on his shoulder, only there to keep their owner steady while a bristled hairbrush sweeps back from his hairline, loosening the waves into something softer than what he’d combed wet and let lay that morning.

The plastic bristles graze over the top of his head and it feels so good he almost wants to get up and run on that principle alone, but Macie only keeps to her brushing, sweeping his hair back in long strokes that slow and taper off at the crown. A gossamer-light chill crawls up the fuse of his spine and burns warm at the base of his neck and Rust can’t help but sink back further into the loveseat, fingertips too-sensitive where they press into the coarse fiber of the crimson carpet.

When the brush falls away Macie’s fingers start pulling through honey-wheat waves instead and Rust tries to push the surfacing memories free from the slate of his mind, tries to keep them from igniting there like curls of sulfur. They catch fire anyway through the vaseline-smeared lens of haunted recollection and he swallows against the knot of heat somewhere in the back of his throat, thinking of a different pair of smaller hands touching the features on his face as she went through the motions of finding them.

 _Eyes_ she’d said, fingertips soft as damp butterfly wings on his eyelids. _Nose_ had been next, punctuated with her tiny hand touching his nose and then the little round tip of her own. _Hair, daddy?_ and Sophia’s complexion had been a drop of coffee darker than his but their tawny-colored waves had been just the same, shining like caramel in the afternoon sun.

Rust realizes he’s been holding his breath again when his lungs start to burn like two candles in his chest, and he tries to gently suck in air while his eyes drip half-shut against the scratchy wetness welled there. He won’t meet the stare Marty keeps letting stray over from time to time, no doubt full of something he’s got a finger on but can’t quite name, and as he comes back into the humming noise of the Hart home he reaches up to touch one corner of his eye, ashamed to think they might’ve betrayed him while he was gone.

When his fingers come away mostly dry, Rust’s hand falls into his lap in something like relief.

“You feelin’ alright?” Marty asks, though, lower than any other time he’d spoken since his partner walked through the front door. The tone of it strikes up the coke-addled memory of something that took place in a different living room, full of yellow lamplight and a lingering haze of smoke, two ancient lawn chairs like lonely twin idols.

“Yeah,” Rust says, but it comes out ragged the first time, a wet playing card torn in half. “Yeah,” he tries again, clearing his throat, “just trying not to fall asleep on y’all, is all.”

Macie’s fingers scritch gentle through the hair above his ears and he leans into it a fraction, almost wanting her to press harder, wondering what might happen if somebody pulled the stop and he melted right here through the floor. But then Audrey is finally rising up from her spot on the floor and disappearing down the hall with her diary in hand, coming back again with a soft-covered sketchbook.

She settles down on the floor next to him, legs crossed so one knee presses into the side of his thigh. His eyes cut to the book and she opens it without any sort of preamble, diving right into the colored pencil drawings hidden underneath.

“I’ve been practicing,” Audrey says in a small voice, thumbing the edges of a page covered with rough renderings of seashells and a single pink starfish. She turns the pages over one by one without waiting for comment, past a mermaid with a green tail and animals with oblong cartoonish faces before finally settling on a different sketch of what might be a mourning dove, feathers filled in with more soft violet and blue than true grey.

“You drew this?” Rust asks, half-dazed under the weight of two small hands and the bleeding warmth of this room, insulating him with too much softness and oven warmth, the murmur of Maggie’s movements in the kitchen and Marty burning a low and easy amber when he gets up to help Maggie start filling tea glasses with ice. “It’s very good, Audrey.”

The bird is cruder and more misshapen than something he might sketch with a finer hand on his own time but it’s recognizable enough, pressed with delicate pencil strokes of color into the page, the heartfelt and earnest effort of an eleven-year-old. Audrey smiles to herself and nods but doesn’t loiter, already flipping forward in the book.

The next several pages have been arranged with scissor-edged pictures, glossy with shine like they were taken from a magazine. Paintings and portraits from the past, some color-dappled and recognizable as Monet’s garden and Degas’s dancers, others cut cleaner with abstract lines or flooded blots of watercolor.

“Miss Manja tells us to find art we like for inspiration,” Audrey says, turning past a bouquet of Van Gogh’s sunflowers. “She let us use all her old art magazines that she brought to school.”

She pauses on one page in particular and Rust’s eyes have already narrowed enough that he’s peering through his lashes, hardly making out the two handsome figures lounging across the scene of the painting.

“I thought this kinda looked like Daddy, in his work clothes,” she says, fingers brushing over a square-jawed blond who looks like he was cut free from an older age of American romanticism, faintly ruddy but strong-shouldered. “And this one could be you.”

Rust looks again and there’s another man next to the first, just as handsome as his partner with a headful of oiled finger waves, the two of them suited and wedged together without touching even though they incline enough into the breadth of each other’s orbit that there’s a clear conversation taking place, clandestine and spoken through the tilt of their shoulders and the corner of mouths.

There’s a name tucked in the corner of the print, tiny and faint but Rust doesn’t need to squint to know who the painting belongs to. He clears his throat and looks up, a ghost of laughter building behind his teeth, and when he does Marty is standing with his hands on the back of the couch, sleeves pushed up to his elbows with two light brows high on his forehead.

“Y’all think you wanna eat tonight or are we gonna start up a knitting circle next?” he asks, something faintly bemused hanging around his mouth where it mixes with a runny smile. “Get on over here, your mama—uh, Maggie’s got food on the table.”

The girls move like young marsh rabbits at dawn, hopping slow and then more quickly when Rust pushes to his feet and stands, letting his left side stretch and pull taut for a moment before his lung unhitches and fills with air. His arms feel like they’ve been rolled out flat and reformed, loose and heavy and full of something like a numbing hangover without the pounding behind his eye sockets.

When he sits down at the table, Maggie’s eyes keep darting to his face, landing somewhere higher than his line of sight while she runs a forefinger down the sweating body of her glass. She smiles and then reaches up to touch her own mouth, surprised to be giving herself away like this.

“Uh,” Marty says, sniffing hard as he focuses on scooping a heap of potatoes on his plate, eyes not on anything but the task at hand. “You—you got something, right there, might wanna take it out.”

Macie giggles and Audrey smiles, the two of them suddenly thick as thieves on their shared side of the table, and Rust blinks through some of the diluted fatigue still draping across his senses before he follows their eyes to the top of his head.

His fingers touch and pull something free, and in the palm of his hand he finds a little metal clip adorned with something like a blue cornflower.

“Mmm,” he hums, unbothered, setting it down on the table next to his glass where it stays for the rest of dinner. “Pretty.”

Later, smoking out on the porch with Marty working steady through three fingers of bourbon next to him, talking about nothing and not particularly waiting on Rust to bite, he wonders what kind of picture he might make now, hand-painted as an afterthought into the scene of a home that doesn’t belong to him.

Six cigarettes left in the pack, and that’ll be good and plenty.  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> The unnamed mystery artist is one J.C. Leyendecker, famed American illustrator known for his lush depictions of the idealized male. I definitely suggest flipping through his extended works sometime, though for my purposes here I was kinda thinking more along the lines of paintings like [this one.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/5dff0e8f709bd4b687408cf25abdc539/tumblr_n4mjjeRGfs1sjt15vo2_1280.jpg)
> 
> Thank you for reading!


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